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Francis Fey was turning the thin November soil in the long field below Spraiton when he saw the old man coming across the furrows. The figure moved without haste, leaning on the long staff he had carried in life. Francis’s hands stilled on the handle of his tool. He knew the staff. He had seen it resting by the door of Philip Furze’s house many times before its owner’s burial.

The dead man approached as though taking his usual afternoon walk. He wore the same plain coat Francis remembered, and his step had the same careful deliberation of a man who had once walked every acre of this land. When he drew near enough to speak, he stopped and rested both hands on the staff. The staff was the one he had used for killing moles.

“Francis,” he said. “Do not be afraid.”

Francis could not have said afterward whether he heard the words or simply understood them. His body stayed still. The cold air moved over his face, and the field lay unchanged around them, but every part of him wanted to run. He did not run. Duty held him as much as fear.

The elder Mr. Furze spoke with the same measured calm Francis remembered from his living years. He said that several small legacies in his will remained unpaid. The matter troubled him. Ten shillings were owed to one beneficiary, he said, and ten to another. Twenty shillings were owed to his sister near Totnes. The sums were small, but they had been neglected, and he could not rest until they were delivered.

Francis listened, his breath visible in the cold air. He knew enough of the household’s affairs to understand that these were not large amounts. He also knew that one of the people the old man named had died some time ago. He said so.

The ghost was not surprised. He identified the relation who should receive the money instead. The instruction was precise, delivered as though he were setting a matter of business in order before leaving the house.

When he had finished, he promised that Francis would not be troubled again once the payments were completed. Then he made a remark that Francis did not expect. He spoke of his own dead second wife, who had been buried as respectable as any woman in the parish. He called her “that wicked woman.”

The words hung in the cold air. Francis had been in the service of the Furze household long enough to know the second Mrs. Furze by reputation. She had been considered a woman of sober and orderly character. No one spoke ill of her. Yet the old man said it again, quietly, before he turned away. A moment later the field was empty, and Francis stood alone with the smell of turned earth and the long afternoon light.

He went to Philip Furze that evening. He did not expect to be believed. He told the whole story plainly: the field, the staff, the unpaid sums, the dead beneficiary and the surviving relation, and the remark about the second wife. As he spoke, he watched Philip’s face change from patient attention to something else.

Philip Furze was not a man easily moved. He was cautious in business and cautious in speech. But the details Francis reported were not details a servant could have invented. The amount owed to the dead man’s sister near Totnes had been a private matter. The dead beneficiary’s surviving relation was known to the family but not commonly discussed. And the staff for killing moles had been buried with its owner.

Philip gave Francis the money without argument. The first two payments were made within the week. Neither produced any disturbance. Francis then prepared to travel to the house of the dead man’s sister near Totnes, carrying twenty shillings and the hope that the matter would end.

The sister’s house stood a little way outside Totnes, a low building with a walled garden and a door that opened before Francis had finished knocking. The dead man’s sister was a woman of perhaps sixty years, with a face that suggested she had never in her life changed her mind once it was made up.

Francis stated his errand carefully. He produced the twenty shillings. He did not mention the ghost at first, since he hoped the matter might be settled without that particular explanation. The sister listened without expression. When he had finished, she looked at the coins in his hand and then at his face.

“Who sent you with this money?” she asked.

Francis told her the truth. He had been sent by her brother.

Her expression did not change. “My brother is dead.”

Francis explained what had happened in the field below Spraiton. He did not embellish. He gave the facts as they had occurred. The sister listened to every word, and when he was finished she shook her head once.

“I will not take money from a ghost,” she said. “A spirit that returns with such instructions is not my brother. It is a device of the devil. The money is the devil’s money.”

Francis protested. The legacies were real. The amounts were small. Her brother had spoken with clarity and calm. None of it had seemed evil. But the sister was unmoved. She would not touch the coins. She would not keep them in her house. By the time their conversation ended, the afternoon had passed, and she told him he would have to stay the night, since it was too late to return to Spraiton.

Francis slept in a small room at the back of the house. He did not sleep well. In the quiet hours before morning, he woke to find the elder Mr. Furze standing at the foot of his bed, leaning on the long staff. The old man’s face was calm and patient.

The fear that had held Francis in the field was gone. In its place was a sharp, exhausted anger. He sat up and spoke before the ghost could open his mouth.

“You gave me your word,” Francis said. “You promised not to trouble me again once the errand was completed. I did everything you asked. The first two payments were made. I carried the money here. The woman refused it because it came from you. That is not my doing. I have kept my part.”

The ghost regarded him without offense. “You have done as I instructed,” he said. “The fault is not yours. But the money has not been delivered. It remains in your keeping, and my sister has not received what was left to her. The errand is not complete.”

He told Francis what to do. On the following day, Francis was to buy a ring worth twenty shillings. Not less than the value of the legacy. The sister would accept the ring. The ghost did not explain why she would refuse the coins but take a piece of jewellery. He simply stated it as fact.

“You will not be troubled again after this,” the old man said. “The ring will end the matter.”

By the time Francis opened his mouth to question him, the room was empty.

In the morning, Francis did as he was told. He went into Totnes and bought a ring that cost exactly twenty shillings. It was a plain gold band, unremarkable in every way. He returned to the sister’s house and placed it on the table between them.

She looked at it. She did not ask where it had come from. She picked up the ring, examined it briefly, and put it on her finger.

“It is as it should be,” she said.

She did not explain herself. Francis did not ask. He accepted her hospitality for one more hour, then made himself ready to leave. One of the sister’s servants, a young man of few words, was assigned to accompany him on the road back toward Spraiton. The elder Mr. Furze did not appear again. Francis rode out with the twenty shillings no longer in his pocket and the ring no longer in his hand, and he told himself that the business was finished.

Francis and the sister’s servant had ridden nearly to the boundary of Spraiton when the servant turned in his saddle and saw a woman seated behind Francis. She was a woman the servant did not know, but her face was calm and her skirt spread over the horse’s flanks as if she had always ridden there. The servant shouted. The horse bolted, and Francis came out of the saddle before he understood what had happened. He landed hard on the road. The servant dismounted and helped him up. Francis saw no woman. He remounted, and the horse threw him again. This happened three times. Each fall bruised him, and each time he climbed back into the saddle. Passing travellers along the road stopped to watch. Some called out to him. The horse’s eyes rolled white, and its sides were lathered, but it carried him forward until they came into Philip Furze’s yard. At the gate, the exhausted animal put its head down and leaped. Witnesses later measured the distance from the place its hooves left the ground to the place they came down. It was about twenty-five feet. Several members of the household saw the leap from the windows.

The woman followed Francis indoors. Thomasin Gidly saw her first, standing by the fire. Then Ann Langdon saw her near the stairs. Francis saw her over his shoulder. A child who happened to be in the house saw her plainly and began to cry. Sometimes the woman looked exactly as she had in life, a respectable middle-aged figure in a plain dress. At other times she was not a woman at all. On one occasion she became a monstrous dog that stood in the doorway and seemed to belch fire from its open mouth. On another, she took the shape of a horse and flew through the window in the upper chamber. The window broke outward, and one pane of glass and a small piece of iron fell into the yard. The household gathered the pieces and kept them. The child was removed from the house that day. No one could say any longer that these things were happening only inside Francis’s mind.

The first physical attack came while Francis was standing near the bed in the lower chamber. An unseen force took hold of his head and forced it into the narrow space between the bedstead and the wall. The pressure was steady and strong. He could not pull himself free. Several men of the household heard his cry and came running. It took all of them, pulling together, to release him. His face and neck were badly bruised and bleeding.

Because of the injury, a physician was called and Francis was bled. The bandage that had been tied around his arm disappeared in the night. The next morning it was found wrapped tightly around his waist. It had been wound so firmly that his breath came short. Those around him cut it apart. As the cloth parted, it produced a sound that made everyone in the room step back. The noise was like a long, low groan from the cloth itself.

After that, Francis’s cravats and handkerchiefs began to tighten around his neck without warning. Twice he was found struggling for breath with his own neckcloth pulled hard against his throat. The household removed everything that could be used to strangle him. He went about with an open collar, and no one in the house wore a cravat near him again.

The spirit took particular offense at Francis’s periwigs. They were repeatedly torn from his head and shredded in full view of witnesses. He placed his favourite wig in a small box, put that box inside a larger one, set both against the wall, and weighed them down with a joint stool and other heavy objects. During the night, the boxes were broken apart and the wig was reduced to scraps. Francis then attempted to sleep in Philip’s chamber wearing another wig. It was pulled from his head and torn into tiny fragments before morning.

The attacks extended to clothing. Garments belonging to Francis and to one of the maids were torn while being worn. The cloth split as if cut by an invisible knife. But borrowed clothes remained undamaged. The household began lending Francis and the maid other people’s garments. It was a practical defense, and for a time it seemed to work.

The first object to move on its own was one of Francis’s shoelaces. It pulled itself free from his shoe, rose into the air, and flung itself across the room. A moment later, the second lace began to crawl after it along the floor. A maid bent down and caught the moving lace in her hand. It twisted and curled around her fingers, tightening like a living eel. She shook it off with a cry, and the lace dropped to the floor and lay still.

A visiting lady was present on another afternoon when Francis put his hand into his pocket. Within a minute, his glove was torn apart inside the pocket. When he drew it out, it had been divided into remarkably precise strips, as though cut by an elaborate instrument. The lady gave testimony to having watched the pocket move and twist while the glove was destroyed.

A heavy barrel of salt travelled from one room to another without any person touching it. It was found in the pantry one morning, then in the hall, then in the upper chamber. While milk was heating over the fire, a hand-iron placed itself across the pan. Two flitches of bacon then descended from the chimney and arranged themselves on the iron. When the dead woman appeared in human form, she sometimes wore exactly the same clothing as Philip Furze’s living wife, her daughter-in-law.

Francis’s legs were twisted around his own neck or entangled through the frames of chairs and stools. Other people had to work together to release him each time. The household adapted as best they could. They lent him clothes, removed neckwear, secured loose objects, and called in witnesses. None of their precautions worked for long.

On Easter Eve, Francis returned from the day’s labour with Philip Furze and several other servants. They walked together in the late light, tired and talking of ordinary things as they came up the lane toward the house. Francis was a few paces behind them. The skirt of his doublet lifted suddenly, as if caught by a strong hand. Before he could call out, he was gone.

The others did not notice at once. When someone turned to speak to him, he was not there. They searched the house, the yard, the road, and the nearby fields. Nearly half an hour passed. Then one of the searchers heard singing and whistling from a distant bog. They followed the sound.

Francis was sitting in the mud. His eyes were open but not focused. He did not answer when spoken to. Because he had suffered similar fits before, the searchers did not pay much attention to his words at first. They lifted him out of the bog and carried him back to the house. About an hour later, he became fully himself. He was solemn and quite clear about what had happened. The female spirit had carried him through the air, so high that Philip’s house looked no larger than a haystack. He had remained conscious the whole time and had prayed not to be destroyed. She had set him down in the quagmire.

His account seemed impossible until the next morning. One of his shoes was found on one side of the Furze house and the other shoe on the opposite side. His periwig was discovered hanging at the top of a tree.

The part of Francis’s body that had lain in the mud remained numb and strangely unresponsive in the days that followed. On the Saturday before Low Sunday, his companions took him to Crediton to be bled. After the procedure, they left him alone briefly to rest. When they returned, Francis was in another fit. His forehead was badly bruised and swollen.

When he recovered, he said that a bird had flown through the window carrying what appeared to be a stone in its beak. The bird had struck him violently in the forehead. The witnesses searched beneath his chair. They did not find a stone. Instead, they discovered a brass or copper weight, plain and heavy. They broke the weight into pieces, and each person kept a fragment as a physical reminder of what had occurred.

The attacks did not stop. The surviving account provides no certain conclusion. Nobody who recorded the case could discover whether the spirit eventually ceased or even whether Francis remained alive. The witnesses departed Crediton carrying their pieces of the broken metal in different hands, while Francis stayed behind, still subject to a haunting no one knew how to end.

This story is based on a true account included in Andrew Lang’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts. You can read the original account in the free Project Gutenberg edition. And if you are interested in fresh and modern content about dreams that came true, you can find them in my book “Dreams That Wake You Up”, a collection of real dreams and real outcomes, directly from my clients, printed with their consent.

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